I need a vacation!!!

One of these days I need to get around to telling the "Tail of Rusty". The dog we adopted and a month later we gave, back, but it will not be this day. I don't know where the pictures of Rusty are saved.

Anyway, I am in need of a vacation! Fortunately I have one coming up! Next week my boss is going to Rome for a week and while he's out of the office, I am playing hookie! Tim and Howie and I are going to make the long trip to cold Idaho for a few days, and it's gonna be great!

I have discovered in the last couple of weeks, that when my boss goes on vacation, it's not always a happy thing. UGH!! He is already really busy, all the time, and before he goes on vacation it just gets worse! He's been trying to fit in every client possible before he goes and get as much work out the door as possible. Which is great! That is one of the things I do like about my boss - he takes very good care of his clients. But the thing is, he has been packing his days full of client meetings and not having enough time to review the files we have done work on and therefore we have been scrambling like mad for weeks straight to try and keep ours heads and his heads above water! The other day I even began to think the piles on my desk were getting so high that people wouldn't be able to see me when they looked into my office from the hallway! It's pretty ridiculous!

So, the point of all this rambling is that I need a vacation and I am taking it! Watch out Idaho, here I come! And Tim and Howie too!

Janice Kay "Jan" Drinkwine Brewer... Really???

It's no joke. Those are the for real maiden and last names of Arizona's new surprise governor. Tim says her first name should have been Sherry. He he!

But really, I had the surprise of my day today when I checked out the Arizona Secretary of State website and found that there was suddenly a strange, and very much less feminine face than Ms. Brewer's on said homepage, posing as the Secretary of State. "What happened to Jan Brewer?", I asked myself. I surely did not remember voting for a new Secretary of State in the November elections!

The problem with me is I don't watch enough T.V. or check out enough of the national news on-line! I had no idea that Barry (Barak Obama) had tapped into Arizona's gubernatorial electorate for his Secretary of Homeland Security! Thus, Jan Brewer became Arizona's new surprise governor! Tim knew though! Why doesn't he tell me these things... Hmmm...

Transplant Rejection

I think I'm going to have to change the name of my blog. I don't think that the transplant has taken. It may possibly even be in the process of being rejected.

I figure the transplant didn't take because if I really stop and think about, or to be more honest, without even stopping to think about it, I can say that I really don't care that the Cardinals made it to the Super Bowl. I'm even a little bit happy that they lost. Possibly some angst a co-worker of mine has toward the Cardinals has rubbed off on me. Possibly my distaste for the Cardinals comes from the fact that I didn't even know they played football until September. Or maybe it has more to do with my indifference toward football in general. Whatever the case may be, transplanting me to the Phoenix metropolitan area has not been a total success apparently. If it were I might feel a little more pride in the "home team" for making it to the Superbowl, and a little bit of sorrow that they lost. But I just don't. And I'm usually one to cheer for the underdog!

I guess we'll see how the Phoenix Suns season goes. I doubt I'll follow it closely, but that is the one sports team in the Valley that I could support with my whole heart.

Just Catching Up

I know my last post says it was from October 18, but it wasn't. I have blogged more recently than that. That's why I was able to whine that we didn't have any trick-or-treaters and post pictures of Howie in his Halloween costume. Anyway, I don't really know why that was the date my blog entry shows, and I don't know what date this entry will say it is, but here goes! This is sort of a catch up entry of what we did last month. We celebrated our one year annivesary on November 16th. And to help us celebrate I took November 13th and 14th off of work and Tim and I just hung out together for the weekend. It was great. On the 14th we dropped Howie off at the vet to be altered, lucky dog, and we went and hiked one of the trails on South Mountain. It was a ton of fun and we reminisced all about how we ended up being married and committed ourselves to writing the story down for posterity . . . one of these days. It still hasn't happened. Anyway, here are a couple pictures from our hike.









We didn't get any pictures of Howie when we brought him home after his day at the vet. We really should have. He was pathetic. He didn't respond well to the anesthetics and they had to do an emergency IV to get his blood pressure up and he was just pathetic when we brought him home. He moaned every time someone touched him to move him and at one of the stop light on the way home he tipped over, moaned and wet in his car seat. It was one of his sadder days. When the veterinary nurse was briefing us for check out she told us Howie Ba-Zowie wasn't supposed to jump for two weeks after surgery. Whatever! These pictures are from the following day when he was feeling 100% better, and was jumping as much as ever, but he had to wear a cone because he wouldn't stop licking his incision. The cone was the post painful part of the whole experience for him. He hated it. It really humiliated him to wear it.





Now for Thanksgiving! Doot doo DOO! Tim's sister Roxanne and her family came up from Yuma to spend Thanksgiving with us and it was so much fun having them here, despite all the confusion as to whether or not Vance (Roxanne's husband) had to work Thanksgiving Day or not. I was a little nervous that Howie would try to eat the baby, Das, but since Roxanne and family brought their dog, Zoe, Howie didn't bother the baby at all. He pestered Zoe like crazy, but she was quite patient with him. Here are some pictures of our feast, Zaily and Thaeden, Zoe and the rest of us feasters at the holiday table (or bar in our case).









Finally, just because it's cute, here is a video of Howie doing the trick that Tim taught him. Howie thinks it's torture, but we think it's cute enough it's worth convincing a performance out of him regularly.

Halloween Fun!!

Welp, Tim and I didn't really do much for Halloween this year. We went grocery shopping for the first time in almost four weeks, but we didn't bother buying any candy to hand out because I was pretty sure we weren't going to have any trick-or-treaters. I was right. The doorbell didn't ring once, which was a little disappointing. It was our first Halloween in our first house and I couldn't even talk my sister into bringing her munchkins over for some Halloween goodies! Oh well.

Tim and I did go to Hollywood video and rented a couple of movies - not so much scary because I don't do scary movies - using a giftcard I got at a bridal shower, I believe, and they were pretty intense! We rented "Premonition" with Sandra Bullock and watched it for Halloween and it was enough intenseness for me for a while! Then later in the week we watched "Red Eye". I'd seen it before but it still made me so nervous at some parts that I couldn't watch!

Anyway, we did dress up our little Howie for Halloween (not that anyone saw him in his costume since we had zero (0) Trick-or-Treaters). He was a super-cute, if not fierce, Pirate Puppy. Here are a few of my favorite photos!


Howie and Scallywag Tim


In this picture he looks a little bit stealthy and pirate"ish".


Here he just looks humiliated about the costume we made him wear. Poor sad Howie!


And this is how he felt about his hat!

Finally, just for kicks and giggles, and because I think they are the cutest ever and deserve to be adored, here are a few pictures of our nieces and nephews in their Halloween attire!


The Sandall Coven (Stephenie Meyer's Edward Cullen has nothing on these vampires!) and Spider Man to save the day!


The Harry Potter gang - Hermione, Harry and Dobby!


A Butterfly and Iron Man!

HOWIE'S LITTLE EARS

This post will be dedicated to the evolution of our little How-dawg's ears. I can't say what they looked like when he was born, because, well, I never saw them. The first time I ever saw his ears he was nine weeks old and they were really cute and flopsy forward and looked like this:

And just because he is so dang cute, here's another picture from our first day with the How-dawg!



Then, a couple weeks after we got our little bundle of hair (he doesn't have fur and therefore doesn't shed too much! Happy Day!)his ears looked more like this:



They were flopsy backward and they were so cute! Tim thought he looked girly and he wasn't such a fan, but everyone at the vet's office thought he was just the CUTEST thing! And he was!



These days Howie's ears look more like this:



And he's still the cutest dog ever!

Our House - Doot doo DOO!

Now that it has been about six ages since I have posted on my blog, I have a lot to catch up on, and will hopefully be doing so over the next (let's be honest here and not commit me to catching up on too much, too fast) several weeks or months. Whatever it turns out to be. I probably won't write too much tonight. I'll post lots of pictures though, since I finally have a few pictures of our house that I can post! So, enough of the chit-chat! Here are the pictures.

Well, I'll say a couple more things, I guess. The first pictures are from our move-in day, June 21st. The rest of the pictures are more recent. Probably within the last two weeks when we finally got pictures on the walls downstairs so it looks decent enough to show to people!

So, without further adieu . . . here are the move in day pictures.























This is our free piano!! The bishop of our ward down here knew we were moving on the same day he gave his wife a baby grand piano for their eighteenth anniversary. So when the new piano was delivered they just had an extra piano and nothing to do with it. Tim got a phone call with their offer for their free, old piano. All we had to do was figure out how to move it.
Fortunately, we had the moving truck and a two other people (thanks Brian and Claudio!!) who were willing to help us haul it up the eighteen stairs from the garage to the living room! You just can't beat a free piano! Thanks Bishop and Sister Bruce!!


This is our free couch! Thanks Brian for looking out for us, and thanks Larry and Nancy Shannon (Brian's parents, and Brian is my brother-in-law) for hooking us up with a great couch! Now that Howie is big enough to get on the furniture there's no keeping him off of it. He loves it!



And now, the more current pictures!

The plant corner! We love plants and have recently started growing some herbs and some vegetables, now that it's not so hot that everything will sprout and then die from the heat!